Django Blockchained

Saturday: 11:30 - 13:30

Workshop leader: Sylvain Bellemare

As a backend developer, working with Django, a relational database(e.g. PostgreSQL), an asynchronous task queuing system (e.g.: celery/RabbitMQ),a cache system (e.g.: redis), a search engine (e.g.: elasticsearch), do I needto care about some of the hype surrounding blockchains?

What is a blockchain anyway?

What is the difference between the bitcoin blockchain and other blockchains?

Does a blockchain imply a cryptocurrency?

Could I use a blockchain to manage transactions that do not involve money?

What do terms such as "distributed", "decentralized", "immutability","consensus", "byzantine fault-tolerant", "public ledger" mean in the context ofblockchains?

What kinds of django applications could benefit from using a blockchain?

The proposed workshop wishes to look at how a "traditional" web stack poweredby Django could benefit from using blockchain databases in addition torelational databases, search engines, caches, etc.

The workshop wishes be very developer oriented in the sense that developerswho work on web stacks that involve Django and the commonly found storagesystems, such as PostgreSQL can explore new possibilities that blockchaindatabases could possibly open up.

In a similar way that elasticsearch may have made its way into a web stack,alongside with PostgreSQL, a blockchain database could potentially join thefamily.

Taking the wishes of the audience into consideration, the workshop will includea substantial amount of hands-on examples with python libraries that can be used tointeract with the bitcoin blockchain, such as transactions (https://github.com/ascribe/transactions), as well as a python library that demonstrates a usage of the bitcoin blockchain to manage ownershipof digital property -- pyspool (https://github.com/ascribe/pyspool).

These hands-on examples could then be useful for those who sprint on some blockchain-related project.